Research

            Heart rate, by definition, is the number of beats given off by the heart in a unit of time, usually in a minute. There are two main types of heart rate; resting and maximum heart rate. Resting heart rate is the amount of times your heart beats in a minute while resting. Your maximum heart rate is the amount of times your heart beat per minute while enduring great physical activity.

 Your heart rate, also known as pulse rate, can be found on many points on your body where an artery’s pulse is pushed to the surface, usually compressed against a body part such as a bone. Examples of this are in the neck, wrist, two spots in your foot, behind the knee, over the abdomen, and on the chest. Although these are all good ways to check your heart rate, although the most accurate ways are to listen to it using a stethoscope or using a method called Auscultation.  Most of the time, your resting heart rate is closely related to your age and gender. On average an adult woman’s resting heart rate is seventy-five and an adult man’s resting heart rate is seventy.

            Many different things affect your heart rate. Things like size, gender, age, exercise, hormones, Pathology, medications and drugs are all ways heart rate is affect. Something the size of a hummingbird has a heart rate of two hundred beats per minute, but a grizzly bear has the heart rate of about 30 beats per minute. This is because the larger the organism the slower the rate and the smaller the organism the faster the beat.  For the most part, a woman’s heart rate is faster than a man’s. Your heart rate also varies on age. A small infants heart rate is about 120bpm (beats per minute) and an elderly persons heart rate is roughly in the 60’s. Exercise increases your heart rate temporarily depending on the intensity of your workout, and how long you were exercising. Hormones, such as epinephrine, nonepineohine, and thyroid hormones can increase your heart rate. That is why the younger you are the higher your heart rate gets till you are about twelve. There are even certain diseases that can speed up or slow down your heart rate, or that can cause dysrhythmias, which is an “An abnormality in an otherwise normal rhythmic pattern, as of brain waves being recorded by an electroencephalograph.” Medications and drugs, such as epinephrine and caffeine increase it, and digitals slow it down. 

            Do different genres of movies affect your heart rate? Well that is what we wanted to figure out for our science fair this year. The different genres of movies we tested were sad, horror, comedy, and action adventure. Our heart rate, before and after, can be measured by applying force to the thumb side of you wrist. Which movies affected our heart rate the most? The least? To find that out you will have to view our experiment page.